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Biennale Gherdëina VI | Impressions

Last weekend I visited the sixth Biennale Gherdëina in Ortisei, located in the heart of South Tirol. The exhibition under the title “Writing the Mountains” is curated by Adam Budak and features seventeen contemporary artists with new commissioned works spread across the beautiful mountain landscapes as well as in the center of the village.

Meet wonderful Doris Ghetta, the Director of Biennale Gherdëina, the main driving force behind the exhibition and the best tour guide I could ever hope for to experience the Biennale. The exhibition left me with almost forgotten happy feeling after experiencing something very beautiful, unique and somewhat unnoticed by the art travelers as well as local tourists. I hope to leave you inspired to jump on the train and spend the best weekend of your summer in the mountains together with great art.

Scheduled to be inaugurated on June 23rd, 2018 – the day of the 268th anniversary of the birth of a Father of the Dolomites, Dieudonné Sylvain Guy Tancrède de Gratet de Dolomieu usually known as Déodat de Dolomieu, French geologist who in 1792 discovered a calcareous rock which would be named after him along with the grandiose mountain range of northeastern Italy – the 6th edition of the Biennale Gherdëina is a venture into the polymorphous nature of the mountains and their language.

Conducted under a desire of WRITING THE MOUNTAINS, the exhibition combines liminal disciplines of cultural geology, communal ecology, performative science and relational practice of engaged aesthetics, challenging conventional forms of representation and perception as in a reference to the vocabulary of nature, landscape and a community.

Kwade’s new work, Absorption (Dolomite), conceived especially for the Biennale Gherdëina VI and displayed at the crossway of the pedestrian zone, appropriates original Dolomite stone and invites it into a series of transformations through scanning and duplication. The artist engages the viewer in a vertiginous interplay of perception as the walls of the mirror expand space and reflect the surrounding area, literally absorbing it, as the title suggests. Thus Kwade theatricalizes nature and the human being’s participation in it, creating a situation of sensual and cognitive tension.

Can Boulders Love? is Egill Sæbjörnsson’s new work conceived en lieu using video animation and sound projecting onto real objects, mainly rocks found in the neighborhood of Val Gardena. Icelandic artist is well trained in mountain’s languages as he has been for years involved in polyloguing with stones and other natural matter. In his book Stones According to Egill Sæbjörnsson, he says “we need to erase the line distinguishing between dead and living material, as everything on the planet has happened in an unbroken lineage”. He adds: “Humans are walking and talking stones”. Everything on the planet Earth derives from Magma, from rocks and crystals to single cells, bacterias and animals.

The imperfect, unfinished and contradictory characterize the sculptural objects of Franz West, and the constant possibility of linking two very distant ideas, namely philosophy with fine irony. The work was created in 2011 as an artistic seat, raised at two points exactly at the right height to sit down. The sculpture is on display in a private garden in the old town of Ortisei, there for passers-by to act as conscious spectators, maybe even to become involved in a veritable conversation. Communication and interaction with his artworks have always been leitmotivs of Franz West’s artistic production, their culmination being a passionate exchange between the plastic form of the object and the individual human being.

The new work of Claudia Comte, conceived for the Biennale Gherdëina VI, Morphing Sculpture 1: Donut, Cactus and Snake (Viscosity Range), is a totemic collection of forms, a polyphonic assemblage of shapes, interacting one with another in a seemingly uncontrolled way, a formal carnival of sorts… Comte’s is both – an unconstrained joy of making art as well as an attempt to rethink the relationship between the human being and technology, between the man-made and natural materials. Each work is a study on the nature of transformation and metamorphosis. Comte investigates the properties of the materials, their physicality, as well as their magical properties; wood is her favorite medium in conversing with the nature and the universal reservoir of forms.

Biennale Gherdeina 6th reenacts Vascellari’s performative sculpture, I Hear A Shadow, conceived between 2009 and 2011 as an organic, visual and acoustic chamber of mystical experience. A monumental monolith, the bronze cast of the detonated top of a marble mountain occupies a major place of a twilight drama to come, accompanied by collages and slide projections that enhance a multi-sensory, almost psychedelic and kaleidoscopic effect.

A series Absolute presents silent anti-monuments – sculptural versions of the mountaineers’ belongings, fetishizing their presence through the items of typical high mountain clothing which protects the climbers against extreme wind and low temperature. Papčo personalizes as well as mythologizes his protagonists, emphasizing the ethical and corporeal aspects involved in the challenge of a vertical space. The mountains appear as simultaneously a physical/ethical entity, a site of an extreme existential experience, as well as a mythical construct – a phantasmagoria, a desire, a dream, a mental excess.

Jiří Příhoda’s Diogenes’ Barrel (Poetry Pavilion), conceived for the 6th Biennale Gherdëina, is both a chamber of contemplation as well as a performance space for the readings of poetry, written and composed by Alessandro De Francesco. Doubled cylindric structure reflects the dialectics of inside and outside, rendering simultaneously open and enclosed space, a sanctuary within a breathtaking scenery of the Val Gardena’s Col De Flam with a carefully framed view towards the mythical Sassolungo. Executed mostly of wood, the pavilion’s roof is made of a luminescent artificial stoneware Corralit, absorbing daylight and glowing in the dark, thus generating a magical effect on long Summer evenings and nights.

Comte’s new work for the Biennale Gherdeina is a tour de force of sculptural gesture in regards to its scale and conceptual ambition – a pure expression of precision, radicality as well as a humor Comte just talked about…The artist considers the Dolomites’ mountainous hills as a blackboard where the palindromic WOOOW is spelled out with its boldness and grandiosity by 20 spruce trunks each 6m high. But WOOOW is not only a palindrome, it is also an onomatopoeia, meaning the word can be read with a particular sound in mind, a sound, enhanced by its picturesque surroundings, conjuring sentiments of reverence and awe. WOOOW holds no hierarchy of viewship, it can be read from all orientations, forwards and backwards, in this regard the work’s form of address can be thought of as democratic or egalitarian.

You will find more information about biennale here: http://biennalegherdeina.org

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